prisoners retired towards their respective yards. Doubtless amid such a vast and motley collection of men, many taunted the soldiers, provoked them, and dared them to fire. Still they yielded before the bayonet, and entered their own yard. The gates were shut, but a large crowd remained in the passage, provoking the soldiers, from whom they were separated by an iron railing, and threatening them with vengeance. While in this position the order to fire was given. Immediately the massacre commenced. Volley after volley was poured into the terrified crowd, pushing down and trampling on each other in their haste to reach the shelter of the prisons. Men were killed in the act of supplicating mercy, others were shot down while struggling to enter the prison doors. It was cold-blooded murder, and before all the prisoners could get within the walls, over sixty were killed or wounded. When the living had all escaped to a place of shelter, and the carnage was over, the prison yard presented a ghastly spectacle. The man of sixty, the sailor in his prime, and the boy of fifteen, lay scattered around, while the groans of the wounded were borne to the ears of the enraged prisoners within. A sullen silence fell on those gloomy structures, the flags were raised half-mast, in token of mourning, and the prisoners assembled together and appointed a committee to report on the matter. Although the coroner's jury over the slain gave a verdict of justifiable homicide, our Government took up the matter, and appointed Charles King to meet Mr. Larpent, the English commissioner, and investigate it. In their report no one was declared culpable, though it was freely admitted wrong had been done. Mr. King was severely censured for his conduct, but it was not easy to come to a just conclusion, when the testimony of the two parties were so entirely at variance. Mr. Larpent was bound to believe the assertions of Captain Shortland and his troops, as much as Mr. King those of the prisoners. Capt. Shortland declared he never gave the order to fire, and attempted to arrest it after it had begun. This, of course, the prisoners denied, some of them swearing they heard him give the order. One thing, however, is certain; Mr. King never should have let this massacre of Americans pass, with so slight a condemnation as it received at his hands. In the first place, there is good reason to doubt whether Captain Shortland believed there was any great danger at all. A hole in a wall, only large enough to admit the passage of a single man at a time, could easily be stopped up without ringing alarm bells and beating drums, especially as that hole communicated with only two out of five of the yards, and when in three of these yards the prisoners were walking about in their usual quiet manner. Nor could he believe they meditated an escape, when they had just received word that preparations were nearly completed for their restoration to liberty.